News

Dushanbe, Tajikistan - A dramatic decline in brucellosis, a serious disease affecting both livestock and humans in this Central Asian country, is being hailed as the first major victory of the recently privatized national animal health service.Government services in this former Soviet republic all but collapsed during a civil war in the 1990s and by 2004 brucellosis infected 8.5 percent of the country's vast sheep and goat herds. Meat and dairy production declined and people who caught the disease from consuming unpasteurized milk and cheese became debilitated with chronic fevers, muscle pains and weakness.The situation has turned...

Rome - The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in collaboration with Bioversity International, will be convening an International Scientific Symposium on "Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets" in the Green Room at FAO Headquarters in Rome, from 3 to 5 November 2010, as part of the World Food Day/World Food Week 2010 celebrations.  The purpose of the Symposium is to mainstream, as a common path, biodiversity and nutrition as central to sustainable development. It will address the impact of food consumption patterns on agriculture production, on the environment and on poverty alleviation. One of its major outcomes will be an agreed...

Washington, DC - FAO welcomed the launch here today of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), a new multidonor trust fund managed by the World Bank to improve food security and incomes in low-income countries through assistance to agriculture.Calling it a "key instrument to bring to fruition the commitments made in L'Aquila", FAO Deputy Director-General Jim Butler said that the Organization looks forward to working with its development partners to make it operational as quickly as possible.The new mechanism is designed to address the underfunding of country and regional agriculture and food security investment plans, making aid...